Hugh Laurie and James McAvoy to star in unseen Hitchcock and Orson Welles thrillers

Follow the author of this article

Hugh Laurie and James McAvoy will lead two new radio adaptations of previously undiscovered screenplays by Orson Welles, Alfred Hitchcock and Ernest Lehman.

Sherlock and Doctor Who writer Mark Gatiss will direct Laurie in Hitchcock and Lehman’s The Blind Man, a thriller about a blind pianist who receives the surgically transplanted eyes of a murder victim. Laurie, who has a successful recording career as a jazz pianist, said: “The first time I read [The Blind Man] it was like finding a pre-war Bugatti in a barn. We swept off some of the chicken droppings, cranked the handle, and it started first time. It was a thrill and a delight to be involved.” The script was discovered by radio producer Laurence Bowen in a research institute in Texas, along with handwritten notes and letters exchanged between the writers, who had previously collaborated on 1959’s North by Northwest.

Hugh Laurie

Meanwhile, McAvoy leads an adaptation of Joseph Conrad’s classic novel Heart of Darkness, based on a 1939 screenplay by Orson Welles, written shortly before he began work on Citizen Kane. Welles had intended to play both the hero and the antagonist, appearing not only as the megalomaniac ivory trader Kurtz, but also as Marlowe, who travels up the Congo River to find him. McAvoy will now star in both roles. Welles’s script has only been performed once before, in a one-off 2012 stage-production by the Turner Prize nominated artist Fiona Banner.

Both scripts form part of BBC Radio 4’s Unmade Movies series, alongside Arthur Miller’s recently rediscovered play The Hook, which had its world stage premiere in Northampton earlier this year. The screenplay had been reconstructed after six years of exhaustive research by theatre director James Dacre and designer Patrick Connellan.

Alfred HitchcockCredit:
PA

Adrian Noble, former artistic director of the Royal Shakespeare Company, will make his radio debut with The Hook, directing David Suchet, Tim Pigott-Smith and Elliot Cowan in the radio production of Miller’s text.

Jeremy Howe, Drama Commissioner for BBC Radio 4, said: “To discover an unmade screenplay of the calibre of any of these is a find in itself, but to unearth three is little short of a miracle… Get yourself a long drink, a bucket of popcorn, and sit back and enjoy the cream of Hollywood in its heyday – three brand spanking new stories from Arthur Miller, Alfred Hitchcock and Orson Welles.”

James McAvoy at the London premiere of Suffragette, last weekCredit:
Joel Ryan

Arthur Miller's The Hook is on BBC Radio 4 at 2.30pm, Saturday October 17
Orson Welles' Heart of Darkness is at 2.30pm, October 24
Alfred Hitchcock's The Blind Man is at 2.30pm, October 31